Redoing Aquarium

[bhammer]

All, I plan to add more live sand, some more live rock and sand / re-stain the aquarium and stand. Here is the plan of attack and looking for advice if it makes sense:

Siphon water from the 100g display to a 30g QT. Add about 20lbs of rock to it and move the Ritteri Anemone, goniopora coral, sand sifting star fish and the snails to this one. Add the power head and lights over it.

Siphon water into a large (maybe 25g) Tupperware tub, add the fish. 2 firefish gobies, 2 Clowns, 2 Green Chromis a Scooter Blenny and the various crabs.

Place all the rock in another container with tank water. Place the sand in 5g containers with residual water.

I have a canister filter I plan to run. I thought I could run the intake in one, the return in the other and create a siphon from one to another. I'll test this with tap water first to see if the flow is right. If it doesn’t work, which I don't think it will, I will have to modify my skimmer in a way work.

My questions:

1. Will all this be fine for a good 48 hour time period?
2. Will the starfish be okay without sand for the time?
3. I have a 2" sand bed. I was thinking of 3 - 4". Is there a calculator to determine how many pounds I need to make this? It's about 522
4. What kind of sand mix should I use? I was thinking about adding/missing in some of the course crushed coral as well.
5. What is the best thing to give the inside of the tank a scrubbing with when I get all the sand out?
6. Should I "clean" the sand in a way to keep all the itty bitty critters in the sand now?
7. If I rinse the Tupperware out good with Ro water, is there a risk of any leaching? They haven’t been used for anything else.
8. Can I just skip the Tupperware and move all critters to the 30g?

I know this is a lot. Thanks for bearing with me and any help you can give.

 

[juice28]

if it is just going to be for a couple days, I dont see why you couldnt just put them all in the QT tank if you had to separate them, id put the crabs and snails in the smaller container and the fish and coral in the bigger one with the starfish so the crabs dont pick at him(maybe they will, maybe they wont) hard to say how many lbs of sand to use...how many lbs do you have now? since its 2 inches, get a rough estimate of the amount you have and just double it, lets say you got 50 lbs now you need to add about 50lbs i wouldnt wash the sand off and I would not uses crushed coral, I had CC and it was the worst thing ever and eventually the CC will be on top of your sand just collecting trash. I wouldnt do anything to my tank except maybe scrape off of algae in places where I didnt want it., since your using the same tank noneed to get rid of the algae and pods and stuff that is already in the tank, if you do your just gonna end up going backwards to move forward so to speak. since you already have a 2 inch sand bed you can get some non live reef sand and use it to fill up your tank id do 2 parts non live 1 part live or(using the 50 lb example) 30 lbs non-live 20 lbs live because you already have 50 lbs of live in it. that would shave a few bucks, as far as the tupperware goes, ive used mine without doing anything to it and everything was fine and it was for like a week lol just keep the water moving and light it up and you should be fine